The central goal of this dissertation has been mapping, discussing and making sense of the political activities undertaken by Belgian Moroccan, Belgian Turkish and Belgian Congolese organisations based in Brussels. I therefore identified these organisations in the national register of moral personalities. I furthermore administered a standardised questionnaire among a representative sample of the registered organisations. I focused in this questionnaire on both what I call institutional and non-institutional political activities. In making sense of the political activities by ethnic minority organisations I started this dissertation with a focus on the hypothesis developed by the Dutch scholars Fennema and Tillie on the importance of the degree of ethnic civic community. They argue a positive association between a high level of collaboration within a particular ethnic minority associative field on the one hand and a high level of political participation that is observed among the associative elite on the other. They argue an aggregate effect following a high degree of ethnic civic community. It would not only affect the political activity undertaken by the organisations that are involved in the collaborations but also the political activity of those not involved and thereby it is thought to influence the level of participation of the entire ethnic minority associative field. To operationalise this hypothesis Fennema and Tillie designed an index for the measurement of the degree of ethnic civic community. They measure the level of collaboration among the ethnic minority organisations by mapping the interlocking directorates that occur in the ethnic minority associative field. They identify in other words the directors that are seating in the administrative board of more than one organisation. The index is composed by 4 different measures that are summed in one aggregate score. To discuss the aggregate effect they confront the ranking the ethnic minority group holds on both the index and on the level of political ...